I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to speech processing. Specifically, the present invention relates to a novel and improved method and system for compressing speech wherein the amount of compression dynamically varies while minimally impacting the quality of the reconstructed speech. Furthermore, since the compressed speech data is intended to be sent over a channel which may introduce errors, the method and system of the present invention also minimizes the impact of channel errors on voice quality.
II. Description of the Related Art
Transmission of voice by digital techniques has become widespread, particularly in long distance and digital radio telephone applications. This, in turn, has created interest in determining the least amount of information which can be sent over the channel which maintains the perceived quality of the reconstructed speech. If speech is transmitted by simply sampling and digitizing, a data rate on the order of 64 kilobits per second (kbps) is required to achieve a speech quality of conventional analog telephone. However, through the use of speech analysis, followed by the appropriate coding, transmission, and resynthesis at the receiver, a significant reduction in the data rate can be achieved.
Devices which employ techniques to compress voiced speech by extracting parameters that relate to a model of human speech generation are typically called vocoders. Such devices are composed of an encoder, which analyzes the incoming speech to extract the relevant parameters, and a decoder, which resynthesizes the speech using the parameters which it receives over the transmission channel. In order to be accurate, the model must be constantly changing. Thus the speech is divided into blocks of time, or analysis flames, during which the parameters are calculated. The parameters are then updated for each new frame.
Of the various classes of speech coders the Code Excited Linear Predictive Coding (CELP), Stochastic Coding or Vector Excited Speech Coding are of one class. An example of a coding algorithm of this particular class is described in the paper "A 4.8 kbps Code Excited Linear Predictive Coder" by Thomas E. Tremain et al., Proceedings of the Mobile Satellite Conference, 1988.
The function of the vocoder is to compress the digitized speech signal into a low bit rate signal by removing all of the natural redundancies inherent in speech. Speech typically has short term redundancies due primarily to the filtering operation of the vocal tract, and long term redundancies due to the excitation of the vocal tract by the vocal cords. In a CELP coder, these operations are modelled by two filters, a short term formant filter and a long term pitch filter. Once these redundancies are removed, the resulting residual signal can be modelled as white gaussian noise, which also must be encoded. The basis of this technique is to compute the parameters of a filter, called the LPC filter, which performs short-term prediction of the speech waveform using a model of the human vocal tract. In addition, long-term effects, related to the pitch of the speech, are modeled by computing the parameters of a pitch filter, which essentially models the human vocal chords. Finally, these filters must be excited, and this is done by determining which one of a number of random excitation waveforms in a codebook results in the closest approximation to the original speech when the waveform excites the two filters mentioned above. Thus the transmitted parameters relate to three items (1) the LPC filter, (2) the pitch filter and (3) the codebook excitation.
Although the use of vocoding techniques further the objective in attempting to reduce the amount of information sent over the channel while maintaining quality reconstructed speech, other techniques need be employed to achieve further reduction. One technique previously used to reduce the amount of information sent is voice activity gating. In this technique no information is transmitted during pauses in speech. Although this technique achieves the desired result of data reduction, it suffers from several deficiencies.
In many cases, the quality of speech is reduced due to clipping of the initial parts of word. Another problem with gating the channel off during inactivity is that the system users perceive the lack of the background noise which normally accompanies speech and rate the quality of the channel as lower than a normal telephone call. A further problem with activity gating is that occasional sudden noises in the background may trigger the transmitter when no speech occurs, resulting in annoying bursts of noise at the receiver.
In an attempt to improve the quality of the synthesized speech in voice activity gating systems, synthesized comfort noise is added during the decoding process. Although some improvement in quality is achieved from adding comfort noise, it does not substantially improve the overall quality since the comfort noise does not model the actual background noise at the encoder.
A more preferred technique to accomplish data compression, so as to result in a reduction of information that needs to be sent, is to perform variable rate vocoding. Since speech inherently contains periods of silence, i.e. pauses, the amount of data required to represent these periods can be reduced. Variable rate vocoding most effectively exploits this fact by reducing the data rate for these periods of silence. A reduction in the data rate, as opposed to a complete halt in data transmission, for periods of silence overcomes the problems associated with voice activity gating while facilitating a reduction in transmitted information.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel and improved method and system for compressing speech using a variable rate vocoding technique.